Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

Sometimes love can be both the punishment and the crime.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

You are the one who must choose your place.

I had no Freedom. I had nothing.

I just love music generally. If you come to my house I always have music playing.

Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.

I never wear sneakers. I don't feel comfortable in them.

happy people have got something to give to the world.

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.

Brains aren't everything, but they're important.